By OUR TOWN BY ELEANOR WINTERER
My daddy had to go away for a while so I’ll be writing “Our Town” this week.
It all started when Dad revealed in this column his resolutions for the New Year: to spend less time listening to Pacifica Radio and more time trimming the hair that sprouts out of his ears. The first part was easy, especially when he discovered what a hottie Ann Coulter is. But the ear hair trimming soon grew into an insatiable obsession with personal grooming. My mother started to worry when she saw all the bills for nail salons.
To make a long story short, last week Dad locked himself in the bathroom with Mom’s Lady Epi, a gross of teeth whitening strips and a year’s worth of “GQ” magazines. It took two fireman and a pry bar to help us with the intervention and now Dad’s in rehab at the Beau Brummell Metrosexuality Clinic in Barstow. He’ll be back soon and hopefully the slovenly schlub he used to be. But if you see him, do me a favor: Don’t say anything about the large goiter on his neck. That’s where the trouble began.
Before he left, Dad asked me to write his column and I figured, why not? It’s easy to complain about everything without solving anything. I do it all the time in my blog about that mauve menace Barney.
So looking for something to kvetch about, I went to a City Council meeting. I’d seen them before, as when I was a colicky newborn my father used to hold me in his arms in front of the CityTV broadcasts. The steady drone of our elected leaders debating the finer points of a squirrel feeding ordinance would inevitably soothe me back to sleep.
So I thought I knew what to expect: More of Herbed Krust opining against excessive development and soon I’d be sawing logs in the back row. Things did-n’t turn out quite that way.
Council meetings start at 5:45 p.m. and usually go on into the wee hours of the night. I was a little late and got there just after 6. Much to my surprise, Mayor Ham O’Thronner ended the session shortly thereafter. Apparently the only agenda item was an ordinance regulating gum chewing in day spas, a move that has been credited to Councilman Bobby Coniver. But as Mayor O’Thronner later told me, “We realized it was none of our business.” Mayor O’Thronner announced that the next City Council meeting would be in September, as there was no pressing business to consider until then.
The council members were all in good spirits (you would be too if you got dental insurance for only two meetings a year) and, since I’ll be eligible to vote in 2023, they all took the time to debrief me on the latest turn in civic affairs. Apparently the changes began when Benzy Drane, the eminence grise of Santa Monicans for Righteousness and Rules, had an epiphany in Trader Hoe’s: “The world’s going to hell in a handcart anyway, so why waste our time trying to change it?”
But not in Santa Monica. “I don’t have any information but I can tell you that everything is peachy in this city by the sea,” said City Hall public information officer Trudy Ramblinon.
Bub Halebloke explained that the council had recently downzoned all lots in the city to one story, with height bonuses for green buildings and for affordable housing and service establishments. No more huge developments means traffic and parking won’t get any worse.
“Then we cut the zoning ordinance and municipal code down to two pages apiece and contracted a lot of city services out to private enterprise,” revealed Zen Bender.
“Now we don’t need nearly so many people working at City Hall, so we used the money to make sure our schools are the best in the nation and house the homeless in all that extra office space,” divulged Coniver.
“And here’s the kicker,” said Ricardo B. Loom with a devilish grin. “We enrolled all the homeless at Santa Monica College to keep them off the streets during the day. The college has been a pain in the ass since day one, so let them deal with those troublemakers.”
“We’ve solved all our problems so the burgers are on me,” exclaimed Craven McNuggets, passing around a platter of In-N-Out’s finest. “Eat meat three times a day and you’ll live to be 90, I always say. And don’t worry about all that packaging. We’ve got plenty of landfill space.”
Our town’s future looks pretty bright to me, so I don’t know what Dad will grouse about when he gets back. Probably the weather.
In the meantime, now that I’m fully vested in the Daily Planet’s generous pension plan, I’m done writing for this rag. I’m nobody’s fool. (Eleanor Winterer is 3 years old and far too busy to respond to e-mails and phone calls from a bunch of malcontents without lives, so don’t even bother trying to contact her.)
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on April 1, 2005. Read the original PDF.